Abstract
Along the way, [James Davison Hunter] challenges the American church's assumption that it can redeem the culture from the ground up, one person at a time, with the power of ideas wedded to political activism. Flawed and ineffective, this "hearts and minds" approach - dear to so many celebrity pastors, authors, and "worldview" institutes - misunderstands the way sustainable change happens in society and will never achieve its noble purposes. He lauds contemporary American Christianity's impulse to fulfill the "creation mandate" by obeying God's directive to Adam in Eden to subdue the earth and wield dominion over it. Indeed, "to be a Christian," he writes, "is to be obliged to engage the world, pursuing God's restorative purposes over all of life, individual and corporate, public and private." But that divine mandate needs to be combined with a strategy that will actually work. Hunter's alternative model of social change foregrounds the role played by institutions, top-down leadership, and well-financed networks of elites operating at the centers of "cultural production." He rapidly surveys early Christianity, the conversion of the barbarians, the Carolingian Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and its "successor movements" of revivalism and social reform in America; these are historical instances of deep social change driven by the conscious effort to create alternative structures, not just by a shift in ideals. Hunter summons Christians to a more comprehensive application of the Great Commission that, while still carrying them into "all the world," will reach beyond geography to include every institution: the arts, sciences, media, politics, education, entertainment, social welfare, and more. He envisions a culturally engaged church, active in every part of life, bearing witness through its "faithful presence," and "enacting the shalom of God" to bring wholeness to a broken world. Much of Hunter's justification for Christian engagement in the world hinges on his belief that Christianity offers unique solutions to these problems. He doesn't picture Christians entering the pubUc sphere simply as human beings and as American citizens, but rather as agents of the creation mandate helping "to make a profound difference in every sphere of Ufe." Although that vision sounds pretty ambitious, he insists more than once that the goal of Christian activism ought not to be to transform the world. Yet underneath the whole book pulses Hunter's unmistakable desUe for the church to be busy in worldly affairs, to move beyond Word and Sacrament for the sake of Word and Deed. He insists that a "faithful presence" is the Christian's calling "irrespective of influence" (his italics). But by mobilizing the gospel to penetrate Ulto "all realms of Ufe," his goal stiU seems to be to change the world.